Congolese director Jean Luc Herbulot came to prominence a few years back with Saloum, a distinctive supernatural crime thriller populated with vivid characters and filmed with real style. That visual style is very much intact in new film Zero, but it has wider real-world concerns on its mind. It lacks a little of his earlier film’s individuality, but is for the most part a propulsive thrill ride crammed into a limited timeframe.

Two Americans, known only as #1 (Hus Miller) and #2 (Cam McHarg) awaken lost and confused in central Dakar, Senegal. They discover that while they’ve been asleep they’ve been strapped into bomb vests, and a 10-hour digital countdown begins ticking down. They’re contact via earpiece by ‘the man on the phone’ (Willem Dafoe), who promises that the countdown will be halted if they carry out five increasingly dangerous missions.

There is something of the high-concept of Crank at work here, with a great injection of cynical geopolitics. The two men appear to be different stereotypical faces of America on the world stage. The wealthy #1 personifies soft power and influence, and the brutish #2 represents military might. Zero excels when it focuses on the chaos of the situation when both hit their limitations. Herbulot is great at depicting the panic of crowds and utilises a range of visual and editing techniques to foreground individual fear and mass terror. At its best, it’s pure adrenaline.

It’s when Zero slows down that it falters. The inbuilt anonymity of the situation doesn’t lend itself to the rather clumsy attempt to humanise the two men by adding some rudimentary backstory. These moments strip a lot of the tension and the urgency from the film which is never fully regained. The third acts rather strolls to its conclusion when it should be a sprint. These moments also coincide with Dafoe’s tones being absent from the film. You can tell he’s having a ball with his puppet master dialogue and he’s a real asset to the film; sinister and whimsical at the same time.

There is a wider theme about the continued interference in Africa by foreign actors, many decades after most countries gained their independence. It’s clear that Dafoe’s character is working for destabilising influences and Senegal is their chosen playground. Within this framework, it’s easy for the two Americans to be labelled as terrorists by Senegalese authorities as other explosions begin to cause increasing devastation in the vicinity of the two men. Again, this should keep the film on a knife edge as the two men are plastered all over media, so it’s baffling that Herbulot was willing to take his foot off the pedal.

While it doesn’t remain the full-throttle experience it seemingly promises to be, Zero is a well-executed, and fabulously shot, thriller that makes use of the wider scope and bigger budget afforded to Herbulot. Even though the third act limps over the line it is ambitious in its scope and it’s not difficult to chime with its pessimistic assessment of the current state of the world. The Congolese director may not have yet quite figured out how to organically mould his political themes into his action, but he definitely has the potential to unleash something amazing. That or get hoovered into the Marvel machine.

Screened as part of Glasgow Film Festival 2025